Free The Rise of Io by Wesley Chu Page B

drinking half the bottle before passing out on the floor of her bedroom.
    The next morning, she decided that the pounding headache was worse than the jabbering Quasing. She woke up at dawn with the sun poking through one of the container wall holes and boring directly into her skull. She picked herself off the floor and staggered to the water basin. She tried to pry her eyes wider to look in the mirror and experienced fresh waves of pain right behind her eyeballs. A groan akin to that of a dying sheep escaped her lips.
    Good morning.
    â€œDamn, you’re not a bad dream,” she moaned. “You talk too loud.”
    Was all that drinking everything you hoped it would be?
    She buried her face in her hands. “And you talk too much too. I remember you talking all night. Incessantly. How many hours did we argue before I finally passed out?”
    Is that what you remember? Because I stopped talking ten minutes after you took that first drink. You spent the entire night arguing with yourself thinking you were talking to me.
    Ella raised her head. “What?”
    Yes. You were that drunk.
    Now that she thought about it, she did kind of remember having some rather strange discussions about… about…
    At one point, you went outside and asked Burglar Alarm when she was going to settle down and have puppies.
    â€œYou’re lying,” Ella said, her face turning red.
    Io replayed the entire scene for Ella. It was actually a little worse than Io had described. Not only did Ella try to give Burglar Alarm marriage counseling, she ended up hugging the mangy dog and crying big fat tears about how she was Ella’s only friend.
    Ella felt some vomit crawl up her throat. “Do I have any of that drink left? I think I need to throw that devil juice away.”
    It is called tequila, and I agree.
    That morning became the second in a row that Ella had wasted. She was in no condition to leave her home, and ended up reading comics in bed and drinking her entire water supply, which had been meant to last until the end of the month. It wasn’t until midafternoon that the debilitating headache had receded somewhat and she felt well enough to leave the house without feeling as though the sun’s rays were poking needles into her eyes. That and she was hungry again.
    You are always hungry.
    â€œBeing poor does that to a person.”
    Ella spent the rest of the afternoon running errands, first grabbing more noodles for lunch, and then picking up her laundry from Wiry Madras’s. On the way, she stopped by the art gallery to see if the medicine was selling. After all, points on sales wasn’t nothing. She was surprised when she found out that Little Fab had already sold half of the haul in a day. She was even more shocked when she found out the prices he was asking. The fence was practically robbing the people here. She could have sold the medicine herself at half the price and made a complete killing.
    Ella gritted her teeth. If she had only listened to her gut instead of the stupid voice in her head.
    Like I was supposed to know demand was this high.
    â€œThen why say anything at all? Why not just be quiet and let me do my thing?”
    You are now my host. I did not want to waste the next month with you selling drugs on the streets.
    â€œMonth? He sold half of it in a day, at twenty times the markup.” Ella shook her fists in the air. “I would have been rich.”
    No use crying over a bad deal. One cannot predict the future. Just move on.
    â€œYou shut up, you… you alien.”
    Ella stomped out of the Fabs more depressed than ever. She knew that, at the end of the day, she was the one who made the deal; Io hadn’t forced her. Feeling sorry for herself, she decided to cheer herself up by either seeing the most recent American robot movie or playing dice at the Cage.
    As she stood at the intersection trying to decide between the two, a boy from the Terrible Gandhis, one of the